Honey Badger

Suppose your institution has suffered quite a drubbing in the press. Maybe you run a university or a hospital or a labour union or an industrial standards regulatory board — something that provides an important service to a community and has a role to play in that community’s continued well-being. But something terrible has happened. There has been one or more ugly scandals, and your institution’s reputation has suffered.

You need to do some damage control because, damn it, people deserve industrial standards regulation or access to medical care or collective bargaining, etc. I mean, this isn’t about selling widgets, by God. Your institution is important, and it’s really getting it in the slats these days.

So, naturally, you write a children’s book.

[Needle Scratching Across a Record] Well, that’s what Canada’s “house of sober second thought” thought. See, The Senate, an appointed body of 105 more-or-less esteemed Canadians whose primary function is to ensure fair regional representation in legislation, is an essential part of the Canadian parliamentary system, but recently some issues have come to light that reflect poorly on the nation’s Upper House. Because senators hold their jobs until the age of 75, those issues have the potential to persist in the public imagination for decades. Unless, that is, the Senate itself deals with its issues directly.

Well, how bad can it be? Suppose the union leader is skimming from the treasury; a lab tech has been diluting medicine & selling it on the black market; the University’s dean is dating a student in his class at a local motel. That’s the sort of trouble the Senate is in. All of those. At the same time. From Mike Duffy, Nigel Wright and teen-dating Don Meredith to (my personal fave) Senator “Residential Schools Weren’t So Bad” Lyn Beyak, the Upper House is looking a little low these days.

I know what you’re thinking: so plug the hole. Impeach the union leader; fire the lab tech; promote the Assistant Dean and send the creepy Dean on sabbatical until his term ends. That’s how other worthy institutions handle stuff like this. But not the Canadian Senate.

They reach out not to the news-reading adults whose taxes have funded their debacles, but to the children of those tax payers. Check it out: you can download a free pdf of The Wise Owls and read it with your toddler to teach them what the Senate is supposed to do. So what’s wrong with that? Nothing! Kids ought to learn about how government works if they’re going to grow up to be contributing citizens. But you’re going to get a little extra propaganda with that lesson.

What a bunch of rubes these forest creatures (Canadian voters & their elected reps) are!

As a delivery mechanism for a lesson in how government works, it’s it’s a bit of a blunt instrument: “people are whimsically malleable; they elect reps for all the wrong reasons.” But as a propaganda tool for dissuading young minds from ever questioning the role of the ruling class in the state’s private affairs, it’s also a disappointment. And that’s not just because of the concept. The art’s kinda bad, too.

The compositions seem rushed and uneven; some of the characters are more detailed than others for reasons unrelated to the story. And I don’t understand the illustrator’s aesthetic choices (those textures look like masked drop-ins and unfinished at that). But, hey. I get it: they didn’t write it for me. It’s for the kids. Or is it?

Quiet? QUIET? It’s a safe bet most Canadians wish they could forget the Senate was there. We would gladly do so but for their prolonged, incessant disruptions involving $90,000.00 cheques, teenage girlfriends in tax-payer-funded hotel rooms, and pondering of the good that might very well have come from schools that kept an electric chair for blasting the nativeness out of native kids. Oh, it’s many things “up in the trees” of the Red Chamber, but “quiet” ain’t one of them.

The further you get into The Wise Owls, the harder it is to read it as an educative children’s story rather than an imperative alternate reality — one in which the Senate functions like The Providers in a SciFi dystopia. It becomes a sort of inverse Animal Farm where the allegory works to diminish the local forest creatures who are incapable of governing themselves because they suffer from the sort of self-interested shortsightedness that makes scorpions sting the frog they’re floating on.

But there’s good news, kids. A crowned lioness appears from abroad [unlike the other forest creatures, we don’t get lions in Canada] and “roars her [royal?] assent” (pg 20) to an Upper House of Alpha Owls. These magnificent creatures will watch over the miserably deluded average rodents (i.e., Canadian voters and the Members of Parliament they vote for) from a great height with the permission of their colonial master, The Lioness.

The elected animals are totally not qualified to govern. They got their jobs not because they’re good at them, but because they’re “tall” or “sly” or, generally “popular” (pg 7). I mean, why even bother voting? So it’s just a good thing for them there’s a lioness from away who knows how to get things done in a forest. Conversely, the “guardian class” owls have no individuality beyond what the artist gives them: they lack any differentiating features in the script, further removing them from the plane of mundane electoral politics. They are inscrutable and untouchable.

The result is more than a little condescending. If your toddler doesn’t ask what makes the Owls so damn infallible, they’re not toddling right. And when the book peters out in a glitchy, illegible graphic/text collision (pg 22), the reader may be forgiven for wondering if the committee responsible for The Wise Owls wasn’t actually interested in teaching or impressing anybody with this project.

It’s like they just don’t give a damn. “We’re ancient, omniscient, our authority is a metaphysical imperative, and you miserable lot will do as we damn well please” is the closest to a happy ending you’re going to get in The Wise Owls. What can you say about an institution that should play a pivotal role in the equal distribution of justice in your country when it tolerates corruption, cronyism, racism, and more from its members while crafting a book to tell your kids about how awesomely untouchable it is?

No, this is not the act of some Wise Owls. This book is the work of some bad ass, crazy nastyass Honey Badger Senators who are crazy and just don’t give a shit and take what they want.